How should governments respond to the 'sovereign citizen' movement? || Insiders: On Background

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For years, experts have warned of the dangers of the so-called sovereign citizen movement.

This week's tragic police shooting in Victoria has brought this movement into sharper focus.

Detective leading senior constable Neil Thompson and senior constable Vadam DeVaort were killed in the line of duty.

The gunman alleged to have shot them down is Desi Freeman, the self-described sovereign citizen who, at the time of recording at least, remains armed and at large.

To be clear, we still do not know all the details of what happened, but the devastating loss has struck at the heart of the broader police community and prompted debate around how sovereign citizens should be dealt with.

So, how do you deal with a community that sees itself as above the law?

And are tougher measures required?

I'm David Spears on Ngunnawal Country at Parliament House in Canberra.

Welcome to Insiders on Background.

Associate Professor Joe McIntyre is from the University of South Australia and has tracked the rise of the sove sit movement here and abroad.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me.

So let's start with what is a sovereign citizen?

Sure, so a sovereign citizen is a particular type of a pseudo-law movement.

So pseudo-law is the umbrella term that captures all of these various other types of movement.

Sovereign citizen is probably the most famous and the one that most people are familiar with, but there's a whole bunch of other groups.

And what we see is an anti-authoritarian approach, a belief that they have access to some true knowledge of the law,

and the deployment of a whole bunch of arguments that makes it look like they're doing law, but it's not law.

But they generally, genuinely think that they are doing law.

And do they reject all laws or some laws, or how does it, or does it differ from one to the other, or how does that work?

Look, it does differ from one to the other, but generally it's more of a pick-your-own-adventure approach to the law.

So it's not that they completely absent themselves from law.

It's that they say that law, for example, depends on individual consent.

So we can choose which laws we want to apply to us and which laws we can ignore.

And so that allows them to sort of navigate their way through, taking the advantages but none of the obligations.

And does that mean all who class themselves as sovereign citizens are dangerous necessarily?

Oh, absolutely not.

So we get a huge spectrum of different people that are A, using pseudo-law, B, maybe describing themselves as sovereign citizens, and then C, member of what might be conceived of as the sovereign citizen movement.

Each one of them are a little bit different, and we cover a broad political spectrum from left to right, with some of them quite

innocent and naïve in their use, to others being quite radicalized.

Trevor Burrus, and that's interesting when you say from left to right.

So they're not all necessarily extreme right-wing subjects.

Can be on the other end of the spectrum.

Absolutely, yes.

Okay, so that's the ones we need to be worried about then, listening to that list.

What, those who tick the box of adopting some sort of pseudo-law, sovereign citizenship, anti-authority approach

and are quite

far down that rabbit hole, quite radicalized?

Yes, a long way down that rabbit hole.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so how do they end up there?

I mean, this is the question.

How much of this is

about what happened during the pandemic, anti-vax sentiment?

How do people end up in this situation?

Look, we found that the pandemic really radicalized a lot of people in this regard.

So there were a whole heap of people who have always been quite privileged in their engagement with the law.

The law has always treated them well.

And then suddenly, with the pandemic, they were being told they couldn't do things they wanted to do.

They were being forced to do things that they didn't want.

And this really radicalized a whole group of people.

And particular events like the Compueta Canberra really acted acted as super spreader events that got these ideologies out into the communities.

So that's really made a big part of how this accelerated.

It was present before, but that was the real explosive growth was COVID.

And how are they connecting and then

furthering those views or accelerating those views?

Is it social media or is it other

sites that are

forums for this sort of activity?

Look, there's a combination.

Social media is playing a very big part.

There's a real misinformation, disinformation spread through social media.

Some of these are spread through websites.

So Australia's got a weird peccadillo with traffic offences.

We've got a particular focus on traffic offences for pseudo-law.

And there's a number of websites where people are selling access to scripts and arguments to try and avoid traffic offences.

And that's been a big part of the spreader of these.

But there's also an interpersonal aspect.

So we tend to have gurus that go out and there are communities where people are building a community networks at a personal level.

So when they rock up in court, there's 30 or 40 people sitting in the public gallery, sometimes engaging in that litigation from the back of the courtroom.

So there's very much a personal level as well.

As in a group of supporters who will come along to argue the toss on

a traffic infringement to show that they're supporting this sovereign citizen.

Absolutely.

And it's not just arguing.

Sometimes they've been quite intimidatory against court staff and against judges, instances of them standing up and trying to arrest the sitting judge.

So really getting involved in the courtroom proceeding itself.

And how does that work?

Standing up to arrest the judge.

Yeah.

How often is this happening?

Look,

we know that it's happened on many occasions that they try.

We've got the footage of Desi Freeman himself trying to arrest the sitting magistrate.

We've got some instances here from Adelaide where 40, 50 people got into the courtroom and started approaching the judge en masse.

The judge has to flee the courtroom.

Sheriff's officers come in and then that crowd starts chasing judges' staff through Victoria Square after the proceeding.

So like this is really intimidation at quite an intense level.

And is this on the rise, this sort of behaviour?

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And

what's driving that?

I mean, we're out of the pandemic now, so why are we seeing an increase in that sort of activity now?

Look, I think what's happened is

once these people have become radicalized, we are now getting to the point where they are just going down, down, down that rabbit hole.

So these groups

have reached a certain critical mass now where they can start to spread.

these behaviors and it really is a group of behaviors that we see and frankly gen Gen AI is also contributing to this because it's making it so much easier to generate reams of paperwork.

So

that's all.

So

just explain that.

How is AI being used here?

So, look, I've spoken to judges who have been in proceedings and they're getting these arguments.

It sounds like there's something there.

It's a little bit odd.

They can't quite work out what's going on.

And every time they ask a question, there's a little pause, and then this kind of legal-sounded language is bouncing back to them.

And then the associate turns around to the judge afterwards and says, you know, the litigants using ChatGPT.

They're taking the

voice recognition, inputting it straight into chat, and then giving the answers, reading it straight off the screen.

So we're seeing these arguments being bounced back.

We're also seeing it.

It's making it much easier to inundate the courts with paperwork.

The

judges getting five kilo box of documents

on a regular basis, as these people can take their arguments, put it through chat, and generate large documents.

So, I think all of that is seeing it really accelerate away in a way that we might not have expected.

And obviously,

these are all serious problems, whether it's clogging up the court system, let alone hassling a judge, chasing court staff outside the building.

But their threats are a thick part as well.

Okay, and then you've got the issue of what we're talking about this week

with weapons, people arming themselves.

How prevalent is that?

Is it possible to know how many so-called sovereign citizens are turning to actual firearms?

Look, we don't even know how many sovereign citizens there are.

We just don't have that research.

We are flying a little bit blind with that.

And that's kind of scary when you are seeing this potential for violence.

We certainly know that connection with firearms has been present in the States, but it's also present here in Australia.

One of the prominent

adherents here in South Australia was found with a case of weapons and ammunitions, and that sent a real shockwave through the judicial community that we're dealing with him on a regular basis.

We've got suggestions with the Warrumbla shooting that, again, that there were some pseudo-law elements to that.

So I really think there is

an actual violent undertone to this.

And in some ways, that's inherent in the ideology itself.

Well, just picking up on what you said there, that we really don't know the extent of this,

what needs to happen, is there a case for some sort of, I don't know, I've heard the suggestion of a register.

I don't know if that's possible, a register of sovereign citizens.

Look, we've found one of the problems is that this is kind of funny.

Like, this looks kind of humorous.

You have the people rocking up in bunnings.

I'm not wearing a mask because of Magna Carta or I'm not opening the police, the door for the police because of the UN Declaration.

And I think if we look at it as individuals doing something kind of bonkers, it's easy to convince ourselves we don't need a systematic response.

Once we start seeing

this as something that's affecting huge numbers of government departments, it's not courts, not just courts, it's not just police.

Local governments are being absolutely hammered with this.

Every place where people are interacting with the government is now being really badly affected by this, but often is being treated as an issue that requires individual responses on a one-on-one basis.

So I think what we need to say is we need to have some better appreciation of how big a problem this actually is, recognizing that it is having a systemic

issue and that probably needs a broader systemic response.

We have seen South Australia, for example, the sheriff's officers have started creating a registry of pseudo-law litigants so that they can make sure that there are more sheriff officers in court if there's going to be 30 people rocking up.

So that's a list of people who've come before the court, whatever it might be, over traffic infringement, but they're then what recorded in South Australia as

someone to keep an eye on because they're a sovereign citizen.

Yep.

And that gives them some capacity to better manage security and support for judges.

But again, that's happened on a very very ad hoc basis.

Should the other states follow that path?

Look, I think that's been a really positive response here.

But I think we also need to look at doing something like that sharing a whole of government approach because these people are not just doing it with the courts.

They're going to go down to their local government and cause hassles for planning applications there or, you know, National Park Service or whatever it's going to be.

So we need to get better information sharing as well.

You've also suggested the way Canadian authorities are dealing with,

what is it, the de-taxes movement is a pretty good idea.

What do they do?

So the de-taxes movement was one of these more left-wing versions of pseudo-law and was advocating for people to avoid paying their taxes through these various legal arguments or pseudo-legal arguments.

And what

the Canadian regulators did was to use existing law against

tax avoidance and fraud and perjury type regulations to go after the leaders and the gurus and to prosecute them for the criminal offences they were already

committing.

And once those gurus were gone, once the head was chopped off, and the fact that this was just not succeeding, that really was effective at shutting down that detaxes movement, which really quickly petered out in the late teens as a result.

This might be a sensitive question, but what role does mental health play here when we're talking about the profile of those who are going down that rabbit hole?

Look, I think it's not all of them.

There are a range of different people that fall down this rabbit hole.

Some of them are purely naive.

They lack the legal skills to know that this is not legally effective.

That type of person can, I think, be saved with better intervention from the courts and

legal services.

But there is clearly a problem with the true believer type adherent.

And I think, again, we don't have the research, but there's very strong circumstantial evidence that this is a strong correlation with people that might have

some mental health tendencies that need to be looked at as well.

And I know when it comes to radicalising with terrorism, we've had this debate really over the last couple of decades about early intervention, de-radicalization programs.

I don't know if that sort of approach is relevant here as well.

Are there ways to identify those who are attracted to this, starting to go down that path and turning them around somehow with early intervention?

Look, I think so.

I think what's interesting here is that the object of focus is the law itself.

So when we have terrorist ideologies, it's normally driven by a particular political or religious identity.

Here, the focus is the law.

And what we see is that these people tend to have a very high faith in the capacity of law to deliver individual justice.

It's that they think the dominant law has been corrupted in its application.

So they have access to true law.

So underlying that is a question of civics, of legal literacy, and of meaningful engagement with the law.

So when we alienate people from our law, some people are going to be radicalized when they are forced to confront and engage with the law.

So I think that's part that makes it in some ways tricky because it's not a political ideology, it's almost an infrastructure of democracy problem.

Well, that's the big point.

And just to finish on that,

we're talking about democracy, trust in democracy, trust in government, trust in our institutions.

That can be a pretty hard thing to turn around, I guess, can't it?

I think it's one of those things.

You can't trick people into it.

You need to be authentic in delivering a strong democratic institutions that they feel

compelled to engage with.

So you need trust in your democratic institutions and that's a long, slow battle, but it's one that's really worth fighting.

But just to wrap it up, some ideas that you've put on the table there about how better monitoring of those who are heading down this path and I guess greater awareness of this issue, those are steps that are going to help.

Oh, absolutely.

And this requires a whole of government response.

And

I'm hoping that that may be a positive that comes out of this tragedy.

Associate Professor Joe McIntyre, thanks so much for talking to us.

My pleasure.

And if you have any thoughts on this conversation, drop us a line: insiders at abc.net.au.

We'll be back in your feed same time next week.

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